Schematic Slow Performance

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1

My schematic, now populated with many components, nets, and labels, is seriously struggling in performance to view and edit. Even simple actions like panning and zooming in/out are slow and unresponsive. I used EAGLE before and never noticed it being so sluggish. Is there something I should know about that affects the performance this way?

2

I never observed this myself, so just for interest: could you specify how many components you have in your schematics and are these on several sheets or just on one?

3

Also it would be interesting to know more details about your system. So far I have heard from this issue only from a Windows user with two high-dpi screens. Can you confirm that the 3D board viewer is not affected by this issue? For long term we might change the 2D viewers to the same technology as used for the 3D viewer which I expect to improve performance.

You could also try to enable OpenGL in the workspace settings, but so far I never saw a system where this actually improved performance…

4

Video demonstrating the effect:

You can see how the first sheet, with many components, struggles to zoom and pan, while the other sheets do not.

As for my system, it is a laptop computer with integrated graphics, nothing special. 3D viewer seems to work absolutely fine and smooth.

5

OK so generally I recommend to split schematics into smaller pieces anyway, ideally with a schematic frame to also make them printable in a nice and readable format. I agree for long-term the performance problem needs to be fixed but this is not trivial at all so it takes some time. On most systems this problem does not even exist, even with large schematics.

In my experience, performance problems are usually caused by rendering lots of texts (observed especially on Windows). So reducing the number of displayed texts should help a lot. In the board editor this can be done by hiding layers, in the schematic editor you could hide pin numbers (with the tool button next to the grid properties).

Also your symbols contain a lot of texts, I don’t understand why so many texts are needed :see_no_evil: Actually there should be no need to put manual text elements next to each pin. Maybe you should take a look at our official libraries how pins and pads are labeled :wink:

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